Today, and only because you love them: a roundup. The focus? “Best Writing Advice.” Here are a few key suggestions turned up by a Google search.
1. Knuckle down. You’re gonna be at it for a while. This guy says it’ll take you at least ten years before you can expect to reap any rewards from your creative writing. I’d say it varies, but for the most part he’s right (even if he does use too many adjectives). Even Malcolm Gladwell says it takes about ten thousand hours of practice to become an expert at anything.
2. Don’t be repetitive. Uh oh: I think I’ve said this before. But at the risk of being, um, repetitive: be wary of using the same word too many times within one document, article, or – god forgive you – paragraph. In my writing for The Corporation, I’ve discovered I have an embarrassing fondness for the word rich. I’m always mentioning BC’s rich history, or the rich stories of this land, or the richly textured stories presented in the galleries and exhibitions. (Gets a bit rich after a while.) Word to the wise: Under the Edit menu, the “find” function is your loyal friend. It’ll help you locate and decimate those unintentional acts of repetition.
(And what’s with my little rich obsession, anyway?)
3. The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. It’s a golden oldie, isn’t it? But while this adage may have held true a dozen years ago or more, you don’t need me to tell you that email, Facebook, twitter, YouTube and millions of other time wasters are just waiting for the seat of your pants to park themselves in front of the computer. I still haven’t figured out how to ignore these and other distractions when I’ve got Stuff To Write. If there were one on the market today, I’d put my hard-earned money toward an app that locks me out of cyberspace for 90-minute intervals, thereby forcing me to work. (According to Tony Schwartz, author of The Power of Full Engagement, ninety minutes is about how long our brains can remain productively focused on a single task. I am patiently, agonizingly working my way up from four.)
4. Show, don’t tell. “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass,” wrote Anton Chekhov. Closely related to this is E.L. Doctorow’s suggestion that “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
I agree. In fact, I agree so much that I’ve alluded to it in a previous post somewhere, but I can’t find it right now and it’s getting late, so you’re just going to have to trust me on this one.
So here we have four reasonably good pieces of advice about how to approach the craft of writing. But I gotta leave the last words – the best advice of all – to C.S. Lewis, creator of the Narnia series and igniter of children’s imaginations the world over (and, coincidentally, sharer of my birth date):
5. “Always write (and read) with the ear, not the eye. You should hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken.” Every time I sit down to write to you through Infernal Memo, I want to say things just this way. I don’t believe I succeed very often, because I don’t tend to speak in run-on sentences and in the real world I can never relay stories in any sort of logical manner and I’m not even particularly funny in person. But I like it, this act of trying to write the same way I talk. Just like you’re sitting across from me in the saggy, mauve, edges-rubbed-away wingback chair – or better yet, across the table over a cup of coffee and gingerbread at Bubby Rose’s.
Here’s my question to you, in three parts: when you write, do you hear your voice saying the words? Do you hear inflections and pauses? Do you try out syllables and parts of words on your tongue as you wait for the right ones to come?
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